Status of AI in FlightGear

Compare tanker.nas with the AI aerial refueling demos - you can call the Nasal-spawned tanker everywhere when you're out of fuel, it interactively can provide you instructions to reach it, it automatically selects the tanker apprpriate for what you're flying,...

Compare the thermal demo with Advanced Weather - the AI thermals are on pre-defined locations, so there's just zero element of surprise in glider flight, you have to do a lot of preparation up-front in order to get gliding in a different location - Advanced Weather just generates them anywhere in the world, merged right into the other weather patterns,...

Nasal in static models makes them interact with aircraft, no need to pre-define AI or pre-load anything.

So if not for the Carriers, I think we could safely get rid of the AI scenarios - Nasal-driven Wingmen would be far superior in interactivity.

So that core developers can focus on writing C++ core. Just look at examples like tanker.nas, fox2.nas, [url]Curt's fully autonomous f14 demo[/url] or flug's bombable addon: They all use Durk's AI traffic system as their backbone and foundation, but they provide totally different and novel features on top of it.
In fact, there has so much more "AI" development taken place, just because the AI traffic system has become scriptable through the property tree.

Using Nasal, it would be possible to create AI traffic that responds to ATC instructions, and even ATC controllers that control simulated and AI traffic
So there's tons of flexibility here without C++ developers and their spare time being the bottleneck

Curt did that a while back for the f14b, which did a fully automated carrier approach using just Nasal scripting:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/uas ... simulation
http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear- ... 33987.html
http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewto ... =4&t=13615